For the Love of God, Please Edit Your Blog Post!
I wasn’t going to use my afternoon to write a post on Medium about the dire necessity of proofreading your blog post, email newsletter, or whatever else sort of online “text content” you set free into the wilds of the Internet. (“Text content” is apparently the hideous jargon that now signifies what some of us old folk used to call “writing.”)
But for you, dear readers, I will make a martyr of myself and once again put aside the extremely interesting task of following up on invoices so that I might bring to you this message, which, in case you missed it the first time around, is this:
PEOPLE! PROOFREAD YOUR FREAKING WRITING BEFORE HITTING “SEND” OR “UPLOAD,” OR ELSE HIRE ME TO DO IT FOR YOU! (Or some other fabulously talented and glamorous editrix you happen to have at hand in your Rolodex.)
Why? Because when you publish writing (er, I mean text content) that is riddled with grammatical errors and/or typos then at best you risk confusing or else interrupting the reading flow of the engaged and literate audience you have probably spent months or years building up. At worst? You come off as careless or even, dare I say it, not. so. bright.
The former is bad enough, especially if you have an important message, idea, or sales pitch you are trying to get across. Raise your hand if you have ever stumbled over some weird grammatical snag in something you were reading, online or otherwise, forcing you to go back and reread it a couple of more times until you figured out what it was supposed to be saying.
Okay, I can’t actually see you there my friend, so put your hand down. I didn’t mean literally raise your hand.
As for the latter: no one wants to come off as a dum dum, whether we are writing for the fun of it or to further our dreams of filthy lucre. And that is exactly what happened to one of my favorite life advice writers when she emailed me the latest issue of her advice column yesterday and one-third of the way in I came across the term “the Queen B.” Unfortunately, her writing, while incredibly insightful and absorbing, often comes with its share of spelling, grammar, and usage mistakes, and until “Queen B” I just shrugged my shoulders and kept reading. But this? No. Just no.
We have to stop the insanity.
The thing is, I know rationally that your ability to spell or adhere to accepted rules of grammar in no way accurately represents either your intelligence or your abilities and talent in your chosen field (unless that happens to be editing, in which case you are pretty screwed).
How do I know this? Because some of the smartest people I know happen to be terrible spellers. Because not everyone who writes in English is a native speaker. Because the English language is, in my experience, one of the oddest, most illogical, and completely inconsistent languages spoken and written in the history of humanity.
It’s why when my seven-year-old says he “dranken” something earlier in the day I don’t have the heart to correct him nor the energy to explain why his use of the past tense is both logical and yet totally wrong. (You can thank Old English for most of our impossibly irregular verb tenses by the way.)
Then again, my seven-year-old isn’t marketing himself, his company, his cause, or his brand to an online readership who is going to judge him — consciously or no, deservedly or not — on his ability to write error-free text content.
Okay, rant over. Now comes the good part where I admit that I too struggle with producing error-free blog posts and newsletter copy (and sometimes, gasp!, even fail at it). Next, I provide you with a short list of tricks and tools for producing text content that is clean and presentable.
Confession: I too struggle to produce error-free blog posts and newsletter copy. Whew, that’s done, let’s move along now.
So what to do about it? Let me highly recommend the following:
- If you use Chrome or Safari then you need to immediately install Grammarly. I resisted this excellent proofreading tool for months and now I can’t sing its praises enough. It will find and flag errors in your text content across all platforms, including social media! And you can update it with your own style guide specifications (you do follow a style guide, no?). In fact, my Grammarly dictionary now includes “editrix” and “dum dum” as a result of this blog post.
- Choose a style guide, or create your own, and then follow it. For my own writing I follow The Chicago Manual of Style with some of my own tweaks (like using the # sign for number). Of course, this only applies to stuff I am self-publishing; when I write or edit for another organization I always follow their style guide. If they don’t have one, I will suggest one to follow.
- Choose a dictionary (Merriam-Webster, Oxford, etc.) and follow its spelling and usage suggestions. If it suggests two different versions of the same word, choose one and stick to it. Write it down if you have to. Keep in mind who your main audience consists of: for example, if you are British and your audience is American, you might want to consider using the Oxford English Dictionary, which is a mash-up between the two dialects. If you are Canadian then really you are American so I recommend using Merriam-Webster.
- Hire an editor to proofread your writing before you hit “send.” Or at least ask a friend or a colleague to do a once over.
- If you have the time, print out your email, blog post, or whatever, and read through your writing on a hard copy. If not print, then “preview” your writing somehow: something about seeing the same words in a different context tends to highlight errors you might have missed previously.
- Last but not least, if you can’t afford to hire an editor, and want to DIY it, then follow this one rule and you will catch most of your mistakes: Read your writing out loud. Hearing the words you have written is completely different from reading them and you will catch all kinds of errors you wouldn’t otherwise. Just trust me on this one and DO it.
And one last thing: QUEEN BEE! IT’S QUEEN BEE PEOPLE! Yes, “bee” as in BZZZZZZZZ. Okay, I feel much better now.
Happy writing and editing!
Learn more about my work at www.goodstoryeditorial.com or contact me at megan.cossey@gmail.com
